Love poems
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Fog
© Louise Imogen Guiney
Thy mood with man’s is broken and blent in,
City of Stains! And ache of thought doth drown
The primitive light in which thy life began;
Great as thy dole is, smirchèd with his sin,
Greater and elder yet the love of man
Full in thy look, tho’ the dark visor’s down.
The Erotic Philosophers
© John Betjeman
It’s a spring morning; sun pours in the window
As I sit here drinking coffee, reading Augustine.
Amoretti LXXI: I joy to see how in your drawen work
© Edmund Spenser
I joy to see how in your drawen work,
Your selfe unto the Bee ye doe compare;
Sonnet XXIX: When, in disgrace with fortune and mens eyes
© William Shakespeare
When, in disgrace with fortune and mens eyes,
I all alone beweep my outcast state,
Nights of 1964—1966: The Old Reliable
© Marilyn Hacker
for Lewis Ellingham
The laughing soldiers fought to their defeat . . .
James Fenton, “In a Notebook”
The Cleaving
© Li-Young Lee
He gossips like my grandmother, this man
with my face, and I could stand
I Sing the Body Electric
© Walt Whitman
1
I sing the body electric,
The armies of those I love engirth me and I engirth them,
They will not let me off till I go with them, respond to them,
And discorrupt them, and charge them full with the charge of the soul.
Pastoral Dialogue
© Anne Killigrew
Remember when you love, from that same hour
Your peace you put into your lover’s power;
Holy Sonnets: Since she whom I lov'd hath paid her last debt
© John Donne
Since she whom I lov'd hath paid her last debt
To nature, and to hers, and my good is dead,
[Sonnet] You jerk you didn't call me up
© Bernadette Mayer
Nowadays you guys settle for a couch
By a soporific color cable t.v. set
Instead of any arc of love, no wonder
The G.I. Joe team blows it every other time
The Cypress Broke
© Mahmoud Darwish
The cypress is the tree’s grief and not
the tree, and it has no shadow because it is
the tree’s shadow
Bassam Hajjar
Passing Through
© Ai
“Earth is the birth of the blues,” sang Yellow Bertha,
as she chopped cotton beside Mama Rose.
Ladies
© Ezra Pound
I have fed your lar with poppies,
I have adored you for three full years;
And now you grumble because your dress does not fit
And because I happen to say so.
Dream Song 14
© John Berryman
Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so.
After all, the sky flashes, the great sea yearns,
we ourselves flash and yearn,
and moreover my mother told me as a boy
(repeatingly) ‘Ever to confess you’re bored
means you have no
Mary Shelley in Brigantine
© Stephen Dunn
Because the ostracized experience the world
in ways peculiar to themselves, often seeing it
clearly yet with such anger and longing
that they sometimes enlarge what they see,
she at first saw Brigantine as a paradise for gulls.
She must be a horseshoe crab washed ashore.
Father and Son
© Delmore Schwartz
FRANZ KAFKA
Father:
On these occasions, the feelings surprise,
Spontaneous as rain, and they compel
Explicitness, embarrassed eyes——
Sonnet XXX: When to the Sessions of Sweet Silent Thought
© William Shakespeare
When to the sessions of sweet silent thought
I summon up remembrance of things past,
Bridal Song
© George Chapman
O come, soft rest of cares! come, Night!
Come, naked Virtues only tire,
